When asked in an interview to explain what the Libertarian Party stands for, Ron Paul responded: “The Libertarian party is based in the firm principle of non-aggression. We all take a pledge when we join the party that we will never initiate force against somebody else…” “You respect other people’s life; you respect other people’s property. Thou shall not steal, thou shall not murder, and it’s that simple.”
Libertarians emphasize the importance and respect of private property. For a libertarian, welfare, progressive taxation (or taxation period) constitute theft because they involve taking one person’s property involuntarily and giving it to someone else, the implicit assumption being that the first person’s claim to the property was legitimate. So there must be a way to decide whose property is legitimately whose.
One method is a fare, truly democratic system. As I and libertarians would agree, we do not live in such a system. The problem is that the wealthy use their wealth and influence to insure that policies that are good for them are adopted. The most obvious ways are campaign funding (where politicians must sell themselves to corporations in order to gain the necessary funds to be elected) and media control (as the wealthy own almost all the press, as well as all the advertizing the press depend on, they insure only views in their interests are presented). Libertarians are currently facing this problem head on in their bid to get Ron Paul nominated for President. He has received very little elite funding, and the press generally ignore him. When his performance and popularity force them to speak of him, he is denounced or dismissed.
Right now, America can be relatively open and democratic because the population is so incredibly docile; it poses very little challenge to the elite. For example, Ron Paul, who stands for a number of positions that are very much not in elite interests, does not stand a credible chance of winning the primaries, despite the fact that he also stands for a number of positions that the elites like very much. If he did win the primaries, the Republican Party would simply block his nomination. (That is not to say the campaign is a waste of time; it’s basically an awareness raising campaign). It light of the above, one might argue that we should have a more democratic system that is less controlled by the wealthy minority.
But Libertarians say that more democracy is not necessarily good. The reason is that if the system was truly democratic, people may be selfish and short sighted, and vote to have too much of the wealth of the elite taxed, or that the population might reorganize the economic system so that wealth is fairly distributed, negating the need for re-distribution, which the liberations are against. Because the general population, if given full control, might vote in a way that the Libertarians do not like, the Libertarians feel that the population must not be given full control; somehow, the wealthy minority must be protected.
The solution they present is the courts. The legislature is corrupt, in the pockets of corporations, and consistently makes decisions that are against the interests of the majority of people. Supposedly, the courts will provide objective decision making, not dependent on majority rule or the financial backing of the elites. The problem is that the courts will do no such thing. Despite lip service, courts are just as political as legislatures. How are the judges selected? They may be selected by the legislature, or by election, which comes right back to the beginning problem. Likewise, if there is a jury, that is also “mob rule” because the views of the randomly selected jury will, on average, reflect the views of the general population. Finally, the court decisions are affected by lawyer representation. For example, in a case where a very poor individual is suing a conglomerate for pollution damage to his property, he is pitted against a possibly multi-million dollar expert legal team. That would mean, again, that wealth is the controlling factor in political decision making. Is the state to subsidize him, and provide him with a state appointed lawyer? Should the state also provide him with a multi-million dollar legal team?
Coming back to the question at the beginning of this essay, how is it determined if someone’s claim to property is legitimate? It will either be decided by the general population, or by a minority forcing their plan and "vision" on everyone else, as it is done now.
If I sell you medicine, is it rightfully yours if I stole it from someone else? Is it rightfully yours if you stole the money to buy it? Of course not. The entire private property system of the US is rotten to the core, and is based on coercion. Just to speak of the most obvious and least controversial examples: The land that makes up the USA was stolen largely from the Native Americans in our genocide against them, but also from the British, Spanish, and Mexicans. Much of the capital and labor of this country came from the use of slavery and racist and sexist policies to create a second class work force. Today, this coercion continues against people in other countries, most obviously in the Middle-Eastern wars for oil, and the backing of brutal dictators in many countries who will collaborate with the US elite. Domestically, the elites continue and have always used state force to enrich themselves through subsidies, the liquidation of public assets, imposing protectionist tariffs, ensuring the education system suits their needs, corporate bailouts, currency manipulation, hiring lawyers to tip justice in their favor ect… State coercion is how the elite remain elite, and how the super rich stay so rich. The Libertarians would say that the state is all to blame for this, and that the corporations are just “intoxicated on power.” That view is blind, blind to the fact that the two are part of a vicious circle, one strengthening the other. Both institutions are legal fictions, tools for control, and both must be attacked. Corporations use their profits to control the government, and force the government to do their bidding, which interns insures the tyrannical corporations continue to be profitable, increasing their control. The government and corporations make up two sides of the same coin, and that coin is in the pocket of a billionaire.
When the Libertarians call for the sanctity of private property, what they are really saying is that challenges to the elites’ illegitimate property claims are not allowed. That is why they are against more democracy; they fear that if the general population was empowered, it would “steal” the property of the wealthy, but this is code for what they are actually saying: Libertarians fear that the population would deem the property claims unjust and invalid in the first place. Because the Libertarians would disagree with that, they feel the rich minority should continue to maintain control of the political system and be the ones to define "legitimate property" and whose is whose.
This brings us to the major contradiction of Libertarianism. On one hand, they recognize a certain level of class conflict: the wealthy are using the state to unfairly enrich themselves and often at the expense of everyone else. They are waging war and subsidizing industry and manipulating the currency and a host of other things which are bad. But the Libertarian answer is to attack only one source of elite power, the state, and to actually strengthen the other, the claims to property, the corporations. They are almost literally stuffing the pockets of their opponents with cash and power.
They claim they will achieve their reforms purely through the “market of ideas” and the system of checks and balances that the “founding fathers” benevolently bestowed on us.
Many Libertarian ideas are entirely antagonistic to this country’s wealthy elite, which means they will inevitably run up against the very people who "built this country's wealth."
Fascism is capitalism that is on the defensive. Every country that has become fascist did so in order to put down democratic uprisings of the people. As I wrote earlier in this essay, we live in a country of unprecedented freedom. We also live in a country of unprecedented passiveness. The elite do not need to spy on us (as much as in some countries), torture, kidnap and kill us (as much as in some countries), because we do not challenge them. If the libertarians actually became some sort of powerful force and challenged areas of major elite interest, they would find themselves locked out, laws and constitutions be dammed. This is already happening and has already happened. And the more the Libertarians push, the more the crony capitalists will push back. As any Libertarian will tell you, the government violates the constitution whenever convenient. As we have seen so recently, the government under Bush and “left wing” Obama is quite willing to roll back civil liberties for their corporate masters.
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